News

Unable To Beat Public AWS Cloud, HP Gives Up and Joins It

• By David Ramel
• 10/26/2015

Hewlett-Packard has given up on its plan to join the pantheon of leading public cloud providers. Instead, the company will focus on its private and managed cloud offerings, adding support for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The news comes about the same time AWS announced that its blockbuster financial growth is continuing apace in its latest quarterly earnings filing, with report after report having already confirmed its overwhelming cloud leadership position. Those reports likely influenced HP's decision to quit the public cloud game and cede it to AWS, Microsoft and Google.

"We will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on Jan. 31, 2016," HP exec Bill Hilf said in a blog post last week. "As we have before, we will help our customers design, build and run the best cloud environments suited to their needs -- based on their workloads and their business and industry requirements."

And should those needs run toward public cloud computing services?

"For customers who want access to existing large-scale public cloud providers, we have already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of our hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus, and we have worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure," Hilf said. "We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform -- in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure."

HP in March updated its Helion offering with the Eucalyptus AWS cloud tool. "The addition of Eucalyptus to the HP Helion portfolio gives customers the flexibility to deploy existing AWS workloads onto cloud environments they control (private or managed), addressing demand for cost-effective alternatives to public cloud vendor lock-in," HP said in a statement at the time. "HP Helion Eucalyptus is available as a private, managed or hybrid cloud solution to meet a broad range of customer needs."

Then, in June, the company added support for AWS-compatible private clouds to Helion.

It is private clouds -- and managed services -- on which HP will concentrate from now on. "We have made the decision to double-down on our private and managed cloud capabilities," Hilf said. "For cloud-enabling software and solutions, we will continue to innovate and invest in our HP Helion OpenStack platform. HP Helion OpenStack has seen strong customer adoption and now runs our industry leading private cloud solution, HP Helion CloudSystem, which continues to deliver strong double-digit revenue growth and win enterprise customers. On the cloud services side, we will focus our resources on our Managed and Virtual Private Cloud offerings. These offerings will continue to expand, and we will have some very exciting announcements on these fronts in the coming weeks."